


a storm in a highball glass

by sunshowerst



Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [6]
Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Confessions, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Insomnia, M/M, Prisoners To Free People, Reunions, Set during the first movie, its hard to adjust but rusty helps without even having to try
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:07:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29438754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshowerst/pseuds/sunshowerst
Summary: Danny forgets that doors tend to come with locks he doesn't have to pick - or, four years is a long time, even outside of prison.
Relationships: Danny Ocean & Rusty Ryan, Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan
Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128335
Comments: 11
Kudos: 17





	a storm in a highball glass

**Author's Note:**

> i just cant stop writing. someone help

Rusty rubs the beginnings of sleep out of his eyes and sighs, staring blearily at his wristwatch. 

It's minutes shy of one in the morning, what his watch tells him and his alarm clock assures him of. His bathroom light is on and the door is ajar, letting it spill out in yellow and orange on his imported, softer than the mattress carpet.

He hasn't slept in two days and one hour he did get wasn't even close to enough to not make him dizzy when he stands up. He sighs again, and makes it to the bathroom door before he has to lean onto something - the doorway, practiced to smooth move but here a necessity - and give Danny the best deadpan stare he can muster while fighting back a yawn and squinting under all of forty watts of light.

"Sorry. Not used to it."

Danny's looking vaguely apologetic and entirely surreal still, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, with his arms resting on his knees, hands gripping each other like he doesn't know what to do with having them. 

On his left elbow, peeking from under the folds of the shirtsleeve he pushed up to there- a scar Rusty didn't see before. On both his wrists, ones Rusty did see earlier today, faded red- from handcuffs that were taken off of him hours ago. That, or Rusty is seeing things. 

Hallucinations do kick in around hour forty of not sleeping, for him, and that is more believable than Danny being here. He almost checks his watch again to see if his vivid dreams care for consistency. 

The shirt was too loose on him - and it was Rusty's shirt, and that was another thing he didn't appreciate learning at one in the morning. 

"Not used to what?"

"Bathrooms having doors. Should've closed them." _Sorry if I woke you_ , he doesn't say, and Rusty doesn't need it, cause they both know why he was a light sleeper. 

"Wanna drink?" 

Danny shakes his head, after some contemplation.

Might be worse than he thought, then. In this light, Danny looks older than he should. There's years hiding in the deep set of his frown, downturned eyes, and the fact that he's frowning at all. Distant, cogging, thinking. He's never been quiet for these long stretches of time, but Rusty has. And Rusty's been the one that waits, so it's alright for now. Five minutes, four years. 

(He didn't apologize even if Rusty gave him an easy springboard setup for it. He just laughed the jail off as if Rusty wasn't left outside of it and wandering like a chicken with a severed head, just as shackled as Danny was inside of it. 

But then again, Danny knew him. And an apology would mean an admittance - well, Danny's had enough of confessionals in gray for life, maybe.)

It's one-fifteen, this time, though. And Danny's hair is more of that gray than black. And Danny's still not smiling, not since the bar earlier when he took the smile off like the tailored suit coat now thrown across the couch in Rusty's living room; the one that hung off his frame when he was given it back. Like the smile didn't fit him as well as it did before, and he hated what that implied. 

Rusty doesn't think this heavy pressure in his lungs at that same implication is the kind of tired he can sleep off any time soon. 

"Wanna talk? I can ring Saul."

"I actually--" Danny starts but stops himself like he's still locked up behind something, a prison that walked out of prison, and it doesn't sound like him at all to have inhibitions, and it's pissing Rusty off more than the thrumming in his temples that's telling him he'll collapse if he doesn't lay down soon. 

"Yeah?" 

Danny gets up after a few more moments instead of answering, and Rusty's glad he has the doorway to lean onto cause Danny takes both of his hands in his own and he's somewhat drunk but this has nothing to do with it (and everything to do with letting it occur).

Rusty is quiet, because he always is. 

Danny's eyes look focused and lost all the same and his hands move slow, thumbs brushing in mirrored movements over the tattoo on his left hand and the skin on his right, like a ritual, every inch of his hands accounted for and worshipped and Rusty waits, still, quiet, cause Danny isn't this drunk but he is this new; and Rusty has to know him because he doesn't care to know anything else. 

Hands move up and still warm, still heavy, with intent, with talk that Rusty's starting to get but not fully, not whole. 

His hairs stand on their ends when Danny shudders out a breath and brushes up his biceps, his fingers wrapping around them and holding on like that's his doorway and Rusty in between them is the entrance he wants to walk through. 

He breathes out again and just as shuddery when he brings a hand to the nape of Rusty's neck and pulls him forward hard into a hug, tight and steely like cellblock doors and just as unrelenting. 

Hugs him, tight, really, really tight. To the point of Rusty not having to worry about keeping himself upright. 

Danny smells like himself and something in his throat tightens at the surprise he felt from it. Like that time Rusty ran from home tight. Like his bones hadn't known since seventeen tight. 

"Not used to that either," Danny mumbles an explanation into his shoulder, and doesn't loosen the hold, and. 

Ah.

Rusty slides his hand up and down his back. Slower. Gentler. A thief's touch, a reminder. Open safes, feel the dice's center of gravity, sense the click that folds the imitation key in place, unclip a necklace that buys twenty eight years worth of groceries when you're dirt poor in New Jersey and as young as the sun lets you be for that long; brush up and down his back and let him know that you get it as much as you can muster to. 

Danny holds him, and Rusty listens for his breathing - shaky on the fifth inhale - and it's vice-gripped like he's scared, like Rusty was scared that he'll lose this to that same gray and unforgiving he drove past once on a rainy night in October and never again. 

Danny holds him and it feels a lot like a promise to something, to someone, and Rusty is tired. 

"Rus--" 

"Mm?" 

"D'you know I came to see you first?" 

Danny lets go then, and lets Rusty really look at his face - framed in golden light of his bathroom light bulb, deep set frown no more after that, but the smile, ill-fitting but not like a bad year ill-fitting, more like a first try-on ill-fitting, and Rusty would gasp if he was ten years younger, shudder if he was fifteen. His eyes hold a storm back from hitting shore but they're shiny and Rusty was never impartial to a cloudburst come nightfall. 

And it hits him then that Danny is not hesitating because of his own inhibitions, but because he thinks Rusty's the one that would mind. 

"Rus. You don't have to-" 

Rusty does kiss him, because he does have to. Kiss the ill-fitting smile, this way or the other, off of his face and bite into the satin of his bottom lip like he wants to savor not the taste, but the sound Danny makes when he does it. 

"No, seriously. Rusty," Danny breathes, pleads, desperate, and pulls away just enough to see Rusty's face, an hour of sleep out of forty nine and tired written all over it and whatever Danny's looking for he'd found because he growls and pushes him backwards and more;

and watches him fall back onto the bed and pins him down like Rusty will run just because he has the option to. There's a wild glint to his eye, a new but welcome, will for life bent out of shape into a need for existence in ways that make it worthwhile. 

Rusty's glad about the carpe diem development to Danny's philosophy now that he's being towered over and pressed and pushed into and pulled apart and defiled and filled up and blown out and it's five am by the time Danny collapses on top of him, slick with sweat and exhausted and Rusty shakes under him like a leaf despite feeling hot all over and jittery, and good like god is good. 

The weight on top he deems a comfort like he rarely found in five star rooms and six figure apartments, and he feels like he needed this as much as Danny did, cause his temples are quiet, like Danny's fifth breath now is. 

"I thought about doing this for four years," Danny mutters, honest like he only is when he's tired, and it's _thank you_ and _I love you_ and _I'm sorry_ and more than enough now that he's here; he kisses his shoulder with lips bitten raw and hot wet and Rusty clenches his jaw, squeezes his eyes shut because the light is still spilling from the bathroom and his head hurts and he's shaking and Danny knew he loved him first, for longer. 

-

He wakes up to an empty bed (usual) and a breakfast smell coming from the kitchen (familiar, missed). 

"Morning, sunshine," Danny says like it's not three in the afternoon. 

"Mhm." He sits down, and ignores the way Danny's smug smirk at the wince he let out made his heart sing, because this is Danny, he knows that smirk and the smugness behind it better than he knows his own, and if he was twenty years younger, he would have teared up. "What're you making?" 

"Pancakes. From the box, though."

"Okay."

"You still like them with honey?" 

"Yeah."

-

-

Danny catches his wrist before Rusty can bring it to his own lips, and licks the honey running down his thumb for him, kisses up the inked skin all the way to his inner elbow, lips sweet and his smile warm like the afternoon was, when he looked up at Rusty. 

"Let me take care of it," he says - not desperate, just confident and just Danny - and Rusty nods, and pretends his vision was blurry because of the sun's glare on the honeyed teaspoon, stuck by its neck in sweet drops on the counter.

**Author's Note:**

> user cleardishwashers comes for my neck in the comments and i have to write more. that is the cycle and it works right now. user cleardishwashers i love you thank you for all this motivation be a life coach if youre not already i feel like you could back me into moving a mountain a meter or two. did i already say i love you im saying it again youre a legend
> 
> comments/kudos/screaming very much appreciated!


End file.
